I was thinking a couple of days ago that, at least as far as examples from my personal life go, I have no idea what I will look like when I’m old. This is because the oldest mixed-race person I know is just 41. The girls and women I saw on TV shows in my early teens seem to have vanished (although, to be fair to the BBC etc., I rarely watch TV). While there are many examples of what white (and black) people might look like aged, there are not so many images of mixed-race people past the age of about 45. Will my hair go white or gray? Will my curls loosen? Will my skin wrinkle, or will I go dark under the eyes? These are mysteries I have yet to solve. Search results for “older mixed race actresses” include such gems as “28 Celebrities You Probably Didn’t Know Were Mixed Race” and “50 Hottest Biracial Celebrities.” Not quite the information I was after.

I understand that part of this is because mixed-race people were slow to enter the cultural lexicon. For example, in the USA, black and white “biracial” people are often referred to as “black”. In the UK, mixed-race people and relationships have been around for hundreds of years (Olaudah Equiano married a white British woman in the 1700s, and here is a more recent example, from WW2). But these relationships and the resulting children were not always in the public eye, and were simply not as common as white/white, black/black, Asian/Asian relationships. So it’s not always a matter of erasure or stigmatisation… in a sense, we were just “late to the party.”

When I started primary school in 1992, I was one of very few mixed-race kids. And I lived in a very multicultural area of London. There were definitely black kids and definitely white kids, and just the one Asian kid, but barely anyone who shared my heritage. At the same school now, the number of mixed-race kids is huge. It makes me feel proud, unnerved, and responsible, that for some of these children, I might be the oldest mixed-race person they have ever met!

As a child, I wasn’t (usually) unhappy about my skin colour and I was proud of my heritage. But looking back, every time I did feel uncomfortable with my race, it was due in part to not feeling like I had examples of people who looked “like me.” I can even remember, quite clearly, the first time I noticed that a black woman was beautiful- and it was pretty late in my childhood. The images I was bombarded with were almost never of non-white, beautiful people, so it didn’t register with me that I could be someone beautiful. When people said my skin was light, or other things that aligned me with “whiteness”, I often felt proud- not just because “whiteness” seemed the thing to aspire to (even the mixed-race models in teen magazines tended to be as light-skinned as possible) but because white people grew older. White people seemed to have futures, in terms of appearance, that I could not imagine for myself.

One of the main (and stupid) reasons given to discourage mixed-race romantic relationships, was that “the children will be confused. It’s not fair on them.” I was lucky- I wasn’t that confused. “Mixing races”, like mixing paints, seemed to me to have pretty obvious results (that included more interesting dinner options and a wider selection of songs). But let’s be honest- confusion is definitely made a lot easier when your image is not repeated, and repeated, and repeated, like everyone else’s.

Times have changed. CBeebies (BBC for little kids) is full of images of all kinds of people, with all kinds of accents and appearances. Mixed-race people appear on all kinds of TV shows and usually their race isn’t even mentioned because it isn’t a big deal and doesn’t add anything to the story. We are one of the UK’s fastest-growing populations… we are everywhere (if the news is to be believed- cheers, Google).

Maybe the older mixed-race people are around after all and I haven’t noticed because they slipped in and became part of the story while no-one was looking. Maybe if I count the white-haired heads, I’ll find some that are my shade. But for a long time this seemed impossible, and since we all know now that representation is important, I don’t think I can say that I haven’t been affected by that fact.

It’s cool, though. I’ll get older and find out for myself. And I’ll let you know.

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I came out as lesbian when I was sixteen and yet I am still coming out- every day- to people who presume I am straight until proven otherwise. Even to people who don’t presume anything at all. Every single time I say “my girlfriend” or “my partner and her family” or anything like that, to someone who doesn’t already know I’m gay, it is a kind of coming out. Coming out is not a one-off thing, it doesn’t just happen between you, and family, and friends, and then just stay where it is. It’s an ongoing process, and it happens every time you meet someone new, every time you enter into a new relationship, any time you do anything that “gives away” your sexual orientation. So, too, with mental health.

Provided I am relatively stable (and even if I am outwardly showing signs of an inner turmoil) my mental health diagnosis is not necessarily obvious to the rest of the world. A person in the street wouldn’t look at me and say “she has bipolar disorder.” I have written about the ongoing struggle with colleagues (I work in the mental health sector) referring to “them” (those with mental health problems) and “us” (those without) and the daily conscience-prick I face nodding or shaking my head at the so-called appropriate times. I take medication and at the moment I am (relatively) stable, and you can’t tell that I have bipolar just by looking at me. And so every single time I tell somebody, it is a kind of coming out. With a new friend, or a new partner, it eventually becomes inevitable that you will have to tell them something about yourself. When your “About You” section is so closely intertwined with the DSM-V, it becomes hard not to spill the beans about your mental health as well. And, unfairly, if you choose not to share you end up feeling like a liar, because such is the black-and-white world in which we live.

Recently, I was introduced to another self-harmer (I have not self-harmed in two years but I refer to myself as a “self-harmer” here in much the same way that an alcoholic will refer to him/herself as “an alcoholic” following ten years’ sobriety). She told me about how her scars were often misjudged and that every time someone sees them, it is a new kind of explanation. Another dredged-up story. That’s how I feel about mine. Today at work I was wearing a pair of ripped jeans- nothing inappropriate, nothing revealing- and a resident asked what happened to my leg. I looked down and there it was- a scar. Faced with the choice between that particular kind of “coming out” and the closet, I chose the closet. “Old story,” I said, and put the scar away. Because it was not an appropriate story for that moment. But when is it?

When is it OK to speak about mental illness and when not and who says so?

It took me a while to come out as gay at work, because I feared judgement and a lack of understanding. In the time in which I find myself now, in the place in which I find myself now, it is so much harder to come out as a person with a mental illness.

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Inspiration for this post comes from mixedmuppet, a “religious lesbian social worker” with a lot to say and a lovely way of saying it.

Any suggestions for G? Again, I’ll take the first one and go with it.

In the UK, yesterday was the day of the 2015 General Election. 66.10% of people voted. That means that 34% of potential voters didn’t. I used to be passionate about compulsory voting: at least go and spoil a ballot! People have died for your right to vote and for your right to keep it a secret. So exercise it. In many other places, people are desperate to vote and can’t… so make sure your vote is counted. But more recently I’ve been thinking, who am I to tell someone to go and spoil a ballot if they genuinely aren’t even remotely interested in politics? Do spoiled ballots really tell us anything and if they did, is that a reason for voting to be compulsory? I’m not sure. If we have the freedom to vote, conversely we have the freedom not to vote. Freedom is measured by the things we are allowed to do, not by whether we do them or not. In the UK, we are free to practice whatever religion we like. That doesn’t mean we have to do it! It’s more a matter of recognising your privilege- if you have the freedom to vote or not vote, acknowledge that that is your prerogative and respect it, irrespective of whether you use it or not.

Aside from the freedom to vote, freedom means so many things to me. In the UK, I am fortunate enough that being a lesbian is not illegal. I have the freedom to love whomever I want, however publicly I choose to do so. I have read so many articles in which people say that because our “sisters of colour” don’t have the choice to hide or not-disclose their skin colour, we should be vocal about our sexuality because we have the privilege of being able to share or not share that, and should exercise our right to do so. I think that’s rubbish. We are lucky enough to live in a society where being LGBTQI+ is accepted (at least legally- the day-to-day ins and outs of life are always trickier). We have the privilege of being able to express our sexuality should we so choose… and we have the freedom not to. There are hundreds of reasons a person might not want to “come out”: religion, career, family pressures, fear, or the feeling that it’s nobody else’s business. So yes, it’s horrible for people to face discrimination for things that they can’t hide: race, some disabilities, even an accent. But that doesn’t mean that our right to come out about something we could conceivably hide is something that we have to exercise. Like our freedom to vote (or not) it is something that we need to respect, but it is our right to choose whether or not to exercise our freedom.

Finally, there are the things that people don’t have the right to do, that impact upon my personal freedoms. People do not have the right to incite racial or homophobic hatred. That doesn’t mean that those hatreds don’t exist on a quieter level, but nobody has the right to go on TV and tell somebody else that my life is worth less than theirs. Therefore I have the freedom to go about my daily life without the fear that a person can completely legally harm me due to my race, religion or sexuality. That doesn’t mean, of course, that an attack can’t happen. But in some places such an attack would be legal or even encouraged, and another person’s right to violence becomes dangerous to my freedom to walk the streets. Like everything else, this relative freedom makes me believe that I live in a privileged position and I need to treat my freedom with the respect it truly deserves.

Going to Brighton Pride at sixteen was the best thing I could have done. By then, I had come out. I wasn’t ashamed of my sexuality- or, at least, not as much as I had been. But I had a black tunnel where my future should be. Just as I rarely saw older mixed-race people, it seemed to me that I never saw older lesbians. When I tried to envision my future, I never got past 24, because that’s the oldest I could imagine being and still being gay. It’s not that I thought my sexuality would change. It seemed like one of the few certainties in my life at that time. It’s just that I couldn’t see it as a thing with a future, or think of myself as a person with a future.

Brighton Pride was revelatory. I saw families there. Gay couples with children, straight couples who were proud to bring theirs along. I saw lesbians of thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. Gay guys of all ages, too. I was there with my second proper girlfriend, and we held a rainbow flag. For maybe the first time, I felt genuinely accepted and understood by all the people around me.

I’m 27 now. Sometimes I wish I were more “obviously” gay. I get urges to shave my head or dress boyishly to prove myself. Part of that is a feeling of wanting to be more visible to other lesbians. It annoys me that I am so often an “invisible” lesbian.

Part of it is that, when I get older, I want to be able to show that lesbians can, and do, live past 24. We exist, and continue to. We grow up, have families or don’t, have partners or don’t, have jobs or don’t. We are real.

At some point in my life, I would like to work with younger LGBT people. I would like to say that it’s OK, that there are more people like us, that we do grow into real adults, and that we come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of fashion sense. I would like it if the need to prove these points would become redundant, and young people could accept themselves and envision their futures easily. But I doubt that the need will disappear any time soon. I am responsible.

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When I was about eight or nine, I asked my mum what “gay” meant. She said, awkwardly, “it’s when a man loves another man.” At eight or nine, I already knew that I was different. That’s an experience common to many LGBT people. I didn’t know how to put it into words, couldn’t have put my finger on it even had it been within arm’s reach. But I knew. I don’t think I’m looking at the past and reading back into it what I want to see- I think it’s a memory, rather than hindsight.

I don’t quite remember, but I think it’s possible I knew before my mum told me what “gay” was, and just wanted to see if she’d tell me. This was around the time that Tony and Simon were a couple in Eastenders, and watching those episodes made me wonder about myself. What about me was similar to them? What was it that I was seeing, that was making me feel less alone? At the time, I wanted to be a boy. I knew people could have “sex changes”, though I knew nothing about the mechanics of it, and I wanted to have one “when I grew up.” This confused me even more- if I was “gay”, did that not mean I shouldn’t like girls? Around that time, I developed a crush on a boy at school, one of the only boy-crushes I have ever had. Looking back I’m not sure it was a crush- I wanted to be his friend, and I wanted to be just like him, and the only way I could express that to a friend was by saying that I fancied him. This offered me further proof that I was definitely gay.

One of my friends called me a “poof”. She said it in a friendly, curious way: “are you a girl now? Or are you still a poof?” That makes me laugh when I think about it. I think I said “no, I’m still a poof.” I don’t think I minded that at all.

Later, I learned what “lesbian” meant. I had a word that described a feeling I still couldn’t quite describe. I learned what “bisexual” meant, and tried to convince myself I was that, because it seemed less offensive somehow, more acceptable. Gradually I came to understand that the label I fit best under was “lesbian.” A lot of people hate labels. I don’t. I realise that some people fit outside labels, or need new ones tailor-made, but for me, being able to put a name to my feelings was one of the most helpful things in accepting them, coming to understand myself, and being able to express to other people what I knew within myself to be true.

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Canterbury is a tiny place. Walking home, I bumped into the man I have been dubbing The Homophobe on the street. He apologised. He said he was sorry, that things never come out right by text and that what he had been trying to say wasn’t what I had taken from it. That he had grown up in a different country, on a different continent and was raised to believe certain things, different things, about religion and about life. And it wasn’t for him to judge me because who was he to know what god might think about who or what I am? What he said in his text, was that god would judge us all eventually but he wasn’t trying to say that god would judge me necessarily on who I love. I pointed out that he had called mine an “irreligious lifestyle choice” and that I certainly don’t need people in my life who think it’s wrong that I am gay- even if they don’t feel that they are personally judging me. I made all the points I made here, about how I feel that god is roughly OK with me, that if I can express myself how I need to, god won’t judge me negatively for that. And he said, who was he to say otherwise.

I don’t think I will text him, though he suggested it. But I feel a kind of resolution there, and maybe he wasn’t the only one who judged or jumped to conclusions in this equation. Maybe I made presumptions about his thinking based on past experience and maybe 8/10 times I would have been right to do so. But maybe I was harsh this time, because maybe what he said he said wrong. That can happen to any of us.

Just a girl with an invisiable illness who is OBESSED with makeup. I'm a huge nerd who just wants to bring awearness to those who do not understand what it is like to be a spoonie. I also want to gush about all things beauty related.